Borrowing famous names from literary history can be fun, but it’s also risky. Those names and the characters they’re attached to have a lot of baggage; baggage that can easily crush an unassured anime series that’s only five weeks old.
Undead Murder Farce breaks out a large number of those names while teasing several others in its new setting of London. We’re introduced to the Gentleman Thief Arsene Lupin, the Phantom of the Opera, Sherlock Holmes and Watson in the first five minutes.
Aya and Tsugaru have been summoned to London by one of its wealthiest residents, Phileas Fogg (of 80 Days fame). The pair and Shizuku meet Sherlock and Watson in the same paddy wagon, but when the bobbies realize who they arrested, they head to Fogg’s sprawling fortress-like mansion without delay.
That said, the wagon ride still enables Aya and Sherlock to feel each other out as they both demonstrate their deductive prowess. The five are joined at the mansion by two members of the Royce Insurance Company’s “Advisory Security Department”: Reynold Stingheart and Fatima Doubledarts, which are some Harry Potter-ass names!
Once his crack team of investigators is assembled (save for Inspector Ganimard from France), Fogg takes everyone deep below his mansion to what could well be an underground Masonic temple. There’s a massive vault requiring three men to uunlock and four to open, and an elaborate silver puzzle box of mysterious provenance containing the black diamond Lupin intends to steal: the Penultimate Night.
Fogg isn’t as fazed by Aya’s bodiless nature because both the safe and the diamond are of Dwarven origin. The Dwarves of this version of the world were wiped out by werewolves, and the diamond and its silver safe are a form of posthumous revenge.
Like the first Lord Godard episode, this is largely setup, introducing us to the new setting and characters. Unfortunately, despite all those big names, the ones who made the greatest impression (other than the established Tsugaru and Aya) were the two Royce agents, each eccentric in their own way. Sherlock and the Phantom in particular are pretty damned dull!
That said, we also have a Penguin-from-Batman-lookin’ Professor Moriarty, who hangs out with, among other yet-to-be introduced colorful characters, a Frankenstein’s Monster-lookin’ giant named Victor. As Tsugaru dryly remarked to Aya, this is starting to feel like a veritable circus of trouble.
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